previous : first : next

I wake from a dream I can’t remember, just an auburn haze of scrabbling and hard breath. Perhaps it was a bad dream; there is a tickling at the base of my spine that squirms me out of bed and into the shower much more quickly than I usually move in the morning. Through the steam I watch the pattern of mildew on my ceiling and breathe. When the water goes cold I realize I’ve forgotten to wash my hair, forgotten to even touch the soap, just stood there in the hot and soothing for twenty minutes. I decide immediately to forgive myself for this: it is morning, and I am awake. That is enough.

The thick terry cotton of my robe is a comfort, as is the sunlight coming through my blinds. I smile to the plants on my table, to the light that reflects and rainbows across my wall from the little glass crescent moon that hangs in front of the window. I breathe. This is beauty. And for a moment, it is. Enough. The kettle is soon enough singing, the mug warm and soothing in my hands, the tea hot and soothing in my belly, calming me. In no time I will be back out into the quick, cold world, so I sit and savor, cling to this moment, this morning. The dream is forgotten, even the itch of it, and I am for a moment whole and unafraid.

But it doesn’t last: the bustling rest of everything shoulders in, eyes rolling, babbling madly, demanding my attention. Look, look, a passing car don’t forget to buy gas pay the water bill look look the faucet is dripping the world is ending look look the dishes need doing, look, and the big angry worryful enormity of it takes me again. I try, I try to close my eyes and breathe, but the rest of everything makes a whole lot of noise.


There is a tree branch that scrapes mournfully across my window, over and over. After a day or so the noise settles into the comfortable background of sounds in my house, and I only hear it sporadically, when I happen to notice. In those moments, I consider cutting the branch, but why? The tree has worked hard enough to survive in this town, the soil covered in concrete and gravel, the water all stolen to fill our pipes, and be sullied or wasted. I should let it rub the window in the wind if it wants.

Oh, the wind. It pulls around the mountains, gathers cold and speed, and rushes against my skin as I walk to school in the morning, huddling in my scarf and mittens. Pushes the branch against my window; pushes the door fast closed behind me. It pushes over garbage cans to wake me, startled, with a crash in the middle of the night, sweeps the gate open with another, wooden crash, hurls leaves and dirt and garbage into my face, brings the sweet perfect rain to cloud the air with water. The wind pulls all the color off the trees, pulls my hair out from my ponytail and whips it into my eyes and mouth. It makes human noises: wailing, moaning, hissing into cracks. I try not to anthropomorphize, but it has fingers, the wind, it has a voice, a hundred moods that it can leap between. The gentle breeze and the screaming gale, the brooding, absolute autumn smell of it these days, laden with moisture and threat.

I find that I love the coming of a storm, the thick air, the looming sky, heavy grey and full of promise. Like the sudden feeling in the room, almost a scent, palatable and unmistakable, just before the first time he says I love you. Hard to decide between that and the crashing storm itself, lightning, the smell of ozone, burning, the violence of flood and thunder.

Perhaps my favorite story is of John Muir: He is young in the story, I think, maybe in his thirties, and he is out camping (as always) in Yosemite, when a storm comes rolling in. It’s a big one, full of rain and bluster, and just as it starts to hit, he decides he wants to be in the middle of it, so he climbs the biggest tree he can find and hangs on to the top of it, whipping around in the wind and rain, lightning striking all around him, and the story doesn’t say but I am sure that he is laughing. Laughing and laughing at the wild, full recklessness of the world, and he says afterwards that the forest was full of bright joy.

That’s the key to it: wildness, and joy. I find myself in awe – truly, awed as though at a vision from god – in awe of all the wild things, everything that writes its own rules. I want to be wild, wild the way Thoreau meant it, as a participle of “willed.” I want to be self-willed, self-moving, I want long arms and legs, want to be languid, full of laughter, lonely when need be. I want to climb things: watch me, and I will climb you like a tree (nest myself in your top branches between the feathers and the leaves, cover you in love like honey). I want sunrise over the desert, sunrise over the Sierras, dark chocolate and belly dancing, I want poetry that brings me to tears. I want thighs wide enough to hold me, a belly that curves because it will one day bring forth life, I want my hair to fly all over the place and my skin to glow with the knowledge that this is me and I am happy. Not in order to be in flagrant, impudent violation of the rules of society; just to live more strongly by my own. To be unafraid to climb a tree in the middle of a thunderstorm and laugh laugh laugh into the sky.

previous : first : next